Frederick Forsyth: The Negotiator

Zemskov nodded. He judged from the marshal’s grim demeanor that there was more to it than reading a report. He had been a mere colonel two years before, when, on a visit to a Command Post exercise in East Germany, Marshal Kozlov had noticed him.

The exercise had involved maneuvers between the GSFG, the Group of Soviet Forces Germany, on the one hand and the East Germans’ National People’s Army on the other. The Germans had been pretending to be the invading Americans, and in previous instances had mauled their Soviet brothers-in-arms. This time the Russians had run rings around them, and the planning had all been due to Zemskov. As soon as he arrived in the top job at Frunze Street, Marshal Kozlov had sent for the brilliant planner and attached him to his own staff. Now he led the younger man to the wall map.

“When you have finished, you will prepare what appears to be a Special Contingency Plan. In truth this SCP will be a minutely detailed plan, down to the last man, gun, and bullet, for the military invasion and occupation of a foreign country. It may take up to twelve months.”

Major General Zemskov raised his eyebrows.

“Surely not so long, Comrade Marshal. I have at my disposal-”

“You have at your disposal nothing but your own eyes, hands, and brain. You will consult no one else, confer with no one else. Every piece of information you need will be obtained by a subterfuge. You will work alone, without support. It will take months and there will be just one copy at the end.”

“I see. And the country…?”

The marshal tapped the map. “Here. One day this land must belong to us.”

The Pan-Global Building in Houston, capital city of the American oil industry and, some say, of the world’s oil business, was the headquarters of the Pan-Global Oil Corporation, the twenty-eighth-largest oil company in the United States and ninth-largest in Houston. With total assets of $3.25 billion, Pan-Global was topped only by Shell, Tenneco, Conoco, Enron, Coastal, Texas Eastern, Transco, and Pennzoil. But in one way it was different from all the others: It was still owned and controlled by its veteran founder. There were stockholders and board members, but the founder retained the control and no one could trammel his power within his own corporation.

Twelve hours after Marshal Kozlov had briefed his planning officer, and eight time zones to the west of Moscow, Cyrus V. Miller stood at the ceiling-to-floor plate-glass window of his penthouse office suite and stared toward the west. Four miles away, through the haze of a late November afternoon, the Transco Tower stared back. Cyrus Miller stood a while longer, then walked back across the deep-pile carpet to his desk and buried himself again in the report that lay on it.

Forty years earlier, when he had begun to prosper, Miller had learned that information was power. To know what was going on and, more important, what was going to happen gave a man more power than political office or even money. That was when he had initiated within his growing corporation a Research and Statistics Division, staffing it with the brightest and sharpest of the analysts from his country’s universities. With the coming of the computer age he had stacked his R and S Division with the latest data banks, in which was stored a vast compendium of information about the oil industry and other industries, commercial needs, national economic performance, market trends, scientific advances, and people-hundreds of thousands of people from every walk of life who might, by some conceivable chance, one day be useful to him.

The report before him came from Dixon, a young graduate of Texas State with a penetrating intellect, whom he had hired a decade earlier and who had grown with the company. For all that he paid him, Miller mused, the analyst was not seeking to reassure him with the document on his desk. But he appreciated that. He went back for the fifth time to Dixon ’s conclusion.

The bottom line is that the Free World is simply running out of oil. At the moment this remains unperceived by the broad mass of the American people, due to successive governments’ determination to maintain the fiction that the present “cheap oil” situation can continue in perpetuity.

The proof of the “running-out” claim lies in the table of global oil reserves enclosed earlier. Out of forty-one oil-producing nations today, only ten have known reserves beyond the thirty-year mark. Even this picture is optimistic. Those thirty years assume continued production at present levels. The fact is that consumption, and therefore extraction, is increasing in any event, and as the short-reserve producers will run out first, the extraction from the remainder will increase to make up the shortfall. Twenty years would be a safer period to assume run-out in all but ten producing nations.

There is simply no way that alternative energy sources can or will come to the rescue in time. For the next three decades it is going to be oil or economic death for the Free World.

The American position is heading fast for catastrophe. During the period when the controlling OPEC nations hiked the crude price from $2 a barrel to $40, the U.S. government sensibly gave every incentive to our oil industry to explore, discover, extract, and refine the maximum possible from domestic resources. Since the self-destruction of OPEC and the Saudi production hike of 1985, Washington has bathed in artificially cheap oil from the Middle East, leaving the domestic industry to wither on the vine. This shortsightedness is going to produce a terrible harvest.

The American response to cheap oil has been increased demand, higher crude and product imports, and shrinking domestic production, a total cutback in exploration, wholesale refinery closings, and an unemployment slump worse than 1932. Even if we started a crash program now , with massive investment, and large-scale federal incentives, it would take ten years to rebuild the pool of skills, mobilize the machinery, and execute the efforts needed to bring our now-total reliance on the Middle East back to manageable proportions. So far there is no indication that Washington intends to encourage any such resurgence in national American oil production.

There are three reasons for this-all of them wrong:

(a) New American oil would cost $20 a barrel to find , whereas Saudi/Kuwaiti oil costs 10-15 cents a barrel to produce and $16 a barrel for us to buy. It is assumed this will continue in perpetuity. It won’t.

(b) It is assumed the Arabs and especially the Saudis will go on buying astronomical quantities of U.S. arms, technology, goods, and services for their own social and defense infrastructure, and thus keep on recycling their petrodollars with us. They won’t. Their infrastructure is virtually complete, they cannot even think of anything else to spend the dollars on, and their recent (1986 and 1988) Tornado fighter deals with Britain have pushed us into second place as arms suppliers.

(c) It is assumed that the monarchs who rule the Mideastern kingdoms and sultanates are good and loyal allies who would never turn on us and hike the prices back up again, and who will stay in power forever. Their blatant blackmail of America from 1973 through 1985 shows where their hearts lie; and in an area as unstable as the Middle East any regime can fall from power before the end of the week.

Cyrus Miller glared at the paper. He did not like what he read but he knew it was true. As a domestic producer and refiner of crude oil he had suffered cruelly in the previous four years, and no amount of lobbying in Washington by the oil industry had persuaded Congress to grant oil leases on the Arctic National Wildlife Range in Alaska, the country’s most promising discovery prospect for new oil. He loathed Washington.